You Can’t Break Me

All of a sudden I didn’t notice the cold air coming off the water.

It’s early Thursday morning and I’m jogging across the Iron Cove Bridge when I tap the radio app on my phone, just in time for the 5am news.

Tina Turner is dead.

It feels like I’ve just hit a bridge pylon.

Tina was eighty-three years of age but she seemed unbreakable.

Her legs and larynx have stopped, for ever.

As a young girl, Tina Turner just wanted to be famous and she made no apologies for it.

She grew up in Nutbush, Tennessee, in a home laced with domestic violence and then married into more of it later on.

When she fled from her husband Ike Turner in 1976, she took refuge in a women’s shelter arriving with thirty-six cents and a Mobil card.

It was a gutsy decision.

Her divorce meant cancelling all the Ike & Tina gigs and being threatened with a pile of lawsuits that would leave her heavily laden in debt.

She kept going.

Turner reinvented herself into a sexy, sassy, performer and launched one of the greatest solo comebacks in musical history selling over 100 hundred million records worldwide.

She paid off the Everest like debt from her lawsuits and smashed every glass ceiling along the way.

But it’s what she did here in Oz that I remember most vividly.

In 1989 while I was at uni, Tina Turner was the appointed ambassador for the Winfield Cup (Rugby League) to help change the ‘blokey’ image of the game.

Her appointment was criticized from pillar to post in the most vile of ways…

“What would a black American grandmother know about rugby league” the critics spat.

Answer: Nothing.

Nor did it matter.

Tina Turner was a star with the common touch who knew how to connect with people and make them move.

And how!

By the time she appeared live at the Sydney Football Stadium for the 1993 rugby league grand final, her critics were so in love with her the place erupted. It was enough to loosen the bolts in the Sydney Cricket Ground next door.

But what made this icon so admirable in my eyes was her ability to transform adversity.

For example, when you read about her childhood in Nutbush, it’s stomach churning stuff. You just want to turn the pages and move on.

Yet, she used it to write one of the greatest dance hits on earth!

Seriously, who hasn’t got up and danced to that little number.

She was the great exemplar of transforming pain into power.

And in a perverse sort of way, her pain ultimately became our pleasure.

There’s an old maxim, ‘what we say the loudest our hearts need to hear the quietest’.

I wonder if she knew that when she wrote, ‘We don’t need another hero?’

Because she was it. She defied every odd.

It’s impossible to imagine this amazing woman resting in peace.

Heaven will be on it’s feet for weeks when she passes through the pearly gates!

She was beautiful, brilliant, and unbreakable to the very end.

The best.

Have a great weekend!

Adam

Back paddock – just when the caterpillar thought the world was coming to an end, it became a butterfly.